Obama gave a very clear message in 2008 when asked how his energy policies would affect the costs of heating and cooling, saying they would “necessarily skyrocket.”
He wasn’t lying.
According to the Houston Chronicle, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the final version of its Clean Power Plan, something that President Obama has been touting as a “moral necessity to fight for a cleaning environment” for over seven years.
The primary goal of the plan is to cut carbon emissions in the U.S., decreasing world temperatures and aiding in the reversal of rising sea levels.
However, the EPA’s own publicly-available research seems to dispute these theories. The regulation is projected to result in a 0.018 degree decrease in global temperatures, and a whopping decrease of 0.01 inches in sea levels.
As you may have guessed, the costs of redesigning the entire electricity grid in Texas is not quite worth the promised results.
The regulation is supposed to cut carbon emissions in the state of Texas by about 34% in the next 15 years.
By redesigning the way the state consumes electricity to achieve this lofty goal, Texas families can expect their yearly electricity costs to increase by 10% every year for more than a decade.
Businesses and families alike will be forced to make drastic changes if the proposed federal regulations are enforced in Texas.
Things like switching to high-efficiency air conditioners could reduce energy usage by 20-50%, but the state needs more answers like this if they don’t want to go broke from the Clean Power Plan.
According to Forbes, the Clean Power Plan is also having a drastic effect on Western states. California traded electricity with the Pacific Northwest by exchanging their natural winter heat for hydroelectricity to power air conditioners in the sweltering summers.
With the implementation of the EPA’s new plan, this is no longer plausible.
The EPA is requiring each state to submit a state implementation plan, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has refused to do. Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined over 10 other states in a lawsuit against the federal government.